


searchlights in the parking lots of hell

by roachpatrol



Category: Motorcity
Genre: Child Abuse, Child Soldiers, Gen, Mad Science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-11
Updated: 2016-10-11
Packaged: 2018-08-21 22:19:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8262397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roachpatrol/pseuds/roachpatrol
Summary: Mike bounces with excitement. “We’re gonna fight!”“Yeah.” The new boy looks weirdly unenthusiastic about basically the best part of Mike’s whole life.“It’ll be fun,” Mike assures him. “Combat’s the most fun. It’s what we’re for.”





	

**Author's Note:**

> _From the housetops to the gutters_   
>  _From the ocean to the shore_   
>  _The warning signs have all been bright and garish_   
>  _Far too great in number to ignore..._

 

They’ve given him another boy to fight today. It’s been weeks since Mike saw anyone his age, so he’s really happy about it: this kid _does_ look his age, even if he’s like a head taller than him, and broader in the shoulders. Mike’s taken down bigger, and anyway, it’s just, it’s cool to meet new people, and do new stuff with them!

“Hi, I’m Mike!” he says, sticking his hand out.

The intercom comes on. _“No contact is allowed before the match.”_

“Right, okay!” Mike changes the handclasp attempt into a little wave. The boy on the other side of the room waves back, a hesitant smile breaking over his face. He’s really pale, and it makes his operation seams stand out like the lines of red light on workbots. Mike wonders if that’s what he’s for.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

“Um,” says the boy. “I... hah...” He touches his forehead. “Mike?”

“That’s my name.”

“Oh. Then... not that.”

“Oh... okay, well, I guess it makes sense you’ve got a different designation, you look like you’re for something else than me. What are you for?”

The boy’s rubbing his forehead now, looking at his feet. “Combat.”

“Hey! We _are_ for the same thing!” Mike bounces with excitement. “We’re gonna fight!”

“Yeah.” The new boy looks weirdly unenthusiastic about basically the best part of Mike’s _whole life_.

“It’ll be fun,” Mike assures him. “Combat’s the most fun. It’s what we’re for.”

_“Recruits, prepare. Match will be best out of five pins. Start on three... two... one. Go.”_

Mike laughs with excitement and launches himself at the new kid, who turns out to be almost as fast as Mike, and a lot stronger. The new kid gets the first pin in simply by grabbing Mike by his arm, when he tries for a punch, and swinging him hard into a wall.

It’s the first time anyone’s bloodied Mike’s nose in a couple months at _least_. He’s thrilled. He fights as hard as he can, after that, and it turns out the new kid’s flinchy, he’s big enough to take a hit but doesn’t want to and they all make him cry out, each time, like no one’s ever taught him not to broadcast his pain. He focuses too much on ducking Mike’s attacks and not enough on pressing his own. Mike can drive him all over the room just by intimidation, and because _he_ doesn’t mind a fist in his gut or a kick to to the face. He’s taken all his hits without extra noise since he was little.

But whenever the new kid actually gets a grip on Mike, he finds himself face down on the ground in an instant, ears ringing, arms locked, while Mike has to wrestle the guy for every inch down to the pin when he’s on top. The new kid wins three to two, and when the intercom dings Mike gives a long, exasperated groan.

“ _Very good, Recruits. Separate now and exit.”_

The new guy lets Mike up, and climbs to his feet, groaning and rubbing at his face, which has some really crazy dark patches where Mike got hits in. One of the operation seams on his arm has come open a bit and is oozing blood and blue light.

Mike rolls to his feet and walks backwards, very slowly, towards his door. “Hey, that was great,” he calls after the guy. “I haven’t lost in forever!”

The new kid frowns over his shoulder. “What? No way,” he says skeptically. “You’re _terrible_. Learn some freakin’ throws, man.”

Mike just laughs, totally delighted. He really hasn’t lost in forever, except to simulations which hardly count, and he was getting _so bored_.

“I will!” he promises. “When I see you again I’m gonna throw you across the room!”

The new kid just grimaces. “And won’t that be fun,” he says, like for some reason it actually won’t be any fun at all.

“Well— yeah,” Mike says. “Okay see you later bye!” and he has to go out the door because he reached it, even though he was walking _really slowly_.

“You did markedly worse on this combat test than your others,” one of his handlers says.

“Yeah!” Mike says, ecstatic. “Can I learn throws?”

 

*

 

He meets the new kid again, but like _ages_ later. His hair’s gotten longer, a bright yellow fuzz, and he’s got more operation seams, when Mike hasn’t had any operations in so long all his seams have totally closed up. Even if they’re both for combat, Mike doesn’t think they’re for the same _kind_ of combat.

“Hi I’m Mike!” Mike says. “Do you remember me?” because sometimes people don’t, even if he’s met them a couple times.

“Yeah,” the new kid says. “Yeah, hi, Mike.”

“Do you remember your name?”

“Chuck,” the new kid says, like it’s obvious, and like he doesn’t remember that last time he didn’t know it.

Mike’s gotten taller but the new kid’s gotten faster. He almost wins three to two but then the new kid makes this absurdly cool snarling noise just before he’s locked into a pin and _rolls_ and _grabs him_ and _breaks Mike’s arm_ and a buzzer sounds. Chuck winces all over, like he was the guy who got broken, and stands up.

“Sorry,” he says.

“Don’t worry about it,” Mike says, even though he’s in like, wow, a lot of pain, like really a lot and it’s not fun anymore.

“I gotta go,” Chuck says.

“Yeah, cool,” Mike says. “I’ll do better next time.”

“Me too,” Chuck says, and he gives Mike a little smile, even. So then it’s fun again.  

 

*

 

“Hi Chuck!” Mike says next time.

Chuck looks blank. “Who?”

“Uh. You’re Chuck.”

“Oh,” Chuck says, like he just realized something important. “ _Oh_ , okay, cool. Who are you?”

“I’m Mike! We’re friends!”

“I’ve never met you.”

“No, but you have, twice. You keep kicking my butt.”

“And you’re _friends_ with me because of that?” Chuck demands, apparently horrified.

“Well, yeah.” Mike is mystified. “Of course.”

Mike wins five to nothing. Chuck moves slow and hesitant, and he makes this horrible noise like he doesn’t even know he’s doing it, a hoarse whimper, and when Mike punches him he screams every time and his eyes get wet like he’s a baby. It’s not fun at all, even a little bit, it feels... wrong. It feels like Mike is doing something wrong.

“Are you okay?” he asks Chuck, on the last pin. Chuck stares blankly up at him, miserable, his eyes ringed with wet red skin, and shakes his head.

“I hate this,” he whispers. Mike recoils, totally stunned.

 _“Separate now and exit,”_ says the intercom.

Mike turns and runs. A handler asks him later what’s the matter, and he thinks about Chuck and his misery and his wet eyes and the horrible noises he made when he got hit and he says—

“I don’t know.”

And he doesn’t.

 

*

 

His heart drops the next time he comes into the applied combat room and it’s Chuck. He’s beaten a lot of guys since the last time they met, and been beaten by two of them, but none of them said they hated it. He’d been asking, even, like he would say, “That was good, right? You’re okay, right?” and they’d say “Yeah,” or “Sure,” or “This was very educational.”

No one but Chuck had said they hated it. No one but Chuck had _whispered_ to him, quiet and secret and... and _honest_.

Mike has been wondering what happens to you, if you hate this. He kind of thought maybe you got to go somewhere else. He was hoping. But here’s Chuck again.

“Hey, Chuck,” he says. He gives the boy a tentative smile.

Chuck is taller. Thinner. His hair’s long enough now to hang around his ears and stick out over his forehead, kind of like Mike’s, which would make him look kind of cute except for how his eyes are totally blank.

“Are you okay?” Mike asks.

Chuck doesn’t say anything.

“Hey, buddy, are you—”

_“Recruits, prepare. Match will be best out of five pins. Start on three... two... one. Go.”_

Mike, for the first time in his life, takes a step back.

“ _Recruits_. _Go_.”

Mike’s shoulders hit the wall.

“I don’t think he’s okay,” Mike says to the ceiling, to whoever’s in the ceiling.

“ _Go_.”

“Hey! He’s not— he’s not okay, he’s sick or something, he’s—”

“ _Go._ ”

“NO,” Mike says. He’s starting to tremble all over, miserable with confusion and fear. “If he’s not going to fight me, I can’t fight him.”

Chuck is still just standing there, dead-eyed. After a long minute, he shudders all over: his lips peel back from his teeth, his hands fly up to grab his hair, a jagged little _noise_  comes out of him, like something’s broken. His raw operation seams pulse and flex, spilling light and hot wind.

Mike looks wildly around for the doors. They’re impossible to see when they’re closed. He can’t get out. He can’t go get anyone to help.

“Let me out!” he yells at the ceiling. “Something’s _wrong,_ let me out, he needs _help—”_

Chuck launches across the room at him, brutally fast, a blur of pale skin and blue light, and buries his fist in Mike’s chest.

He wakes up several days later in the Infirmary, doped up on so many nanites he can _taste_ them. Chuck punched him so hard his heart ruptured, say his handlers, and that’s apparently great. What’s less great is that Mike _let_ him.

“You’ve been made for combat,” says Mike’s favorite handler, sounding stern and tired and _disappointed._ “There isn’t any point to you if you won’t fight.”

“I will,” Mike croaks. His mouth tastes like crawling metal. “I will, I just. I didn’t think...”

“You’re not for thinking,” says his handler. “Next time: fight.”

 

*

 

The next time, he fights. He doesn’t greet Chuck by name or introduce himself again. Chuck is cold and blank and they both charge forward from the word _go_ , and it’s... hard, a hard bad fight. Chuck fights stupid, no feints or finesse, but he hits hard enough to crack bone and he doesn’t feel pain anymore. When Mike pins him the first time he struggles until he dislocates his own shoulder to tear out of the joint lock. But Mike isn’t going to care. This is combat. People get hurt. If he doesn’t give this everything he’s got, _he’ll_ get hurt.

He wins three to two, just barely, blind in one eye, jaw cracked, ribs cracked, arm broken, knee a ruin, and Chuck looks like red, wet garbage. When the match is called Mike can’t get up. He rolls onto his back instead, to _separate._ Beside him Chuck gives an awful convulsion, and the light comes back into his eyes.

He starts to scream.

Mike thinks, _I hate this_.

 

*

 

The next time he sees Chuck, he’s just woken up in the middle of the night because someone’s in his quarters, breathing, touching his shoulder, and when he rolls over he sees a smear of pale skin in the darkness and wide, terrified eyes.

“Chuck?” he mumbles. “I... what...?”

“I’m getting out of here,” Chuck says.

“Okay...?” Mike says, baffled, and glances over at the door.

“I— no, not— not here, your room, I mean _here_ , they’re terminating the project, but I found a way out. I’m leaving. Come with me.”

Mike sits up. “Why would you...” but he knows. Chuck hates it here. He isn’t like Mike. He’s not for combat, even if— even if— even if they made him for it. This isn’t somewhere he should be. Combat is not something he should do. He understands this all in an instant.

“Okay,” Mike says. “Okay, buddy. Let’s go.”

He gets on his day clothes. He goes over his room and gathers up everything he thinks maybe Chuck will need outside the project, wherever that is, whatever it must be like, though there isn’t much he has: a self-care kit with pain adjusters and repairing pads, his hardbody music player, a bottle of water, a squashy packet of his favorite flavor of consumption cubes that he probably should not have been hoarding, but he gets hungry at night sometimes. He ties it all clumsily into an extra day shirt, then carries the bundle under his arm as he follows Chuck out into the hall.

The air around Chuck blooms with green and blue screens, more of them than Mike’s ever seen away from a workstation, and half of them with symbols he can’t even read.

“Wow,” he says. “Are you really smart or someth—”

“Sshh,” Chuck says, because apparently yes he is. They walk quickly and quietly through a bunch of halls Mike’s never seen before, opening doors with the kind of locks Mike’s never known anyone to open. The material of the walls and floors gets weird: grayer. Smudged in places. The air starts to smell wet and cold. The lights flicker.

It feels like they’re walking past where the world ends, and Mike’s heart starts to pound with an unfamiliar thrill. This isn’t like not knowing if he’ll win a fight, or what a new simulation might contain. This is something completely outside everything he’s ever known. Chuck is going... _out_.

There’s a low hum building, and Chuck falters when they come to a T intersection of corridors.

“Enforcer drone,” he whispers. “We gotta— we gotta take it out.” He looks sweaty and terrified. Mike claps him on the shoulder and pushes past.

“I’ll get it,” he says, though he doesn’t know what an enforcer drone is. He bounces on his heels, swings his arms a few times to warm up, and trots down the corridor.

An enforcer drone is a big boxy thing that shoots red-hot energy beams and doesn’t seem to care if it gets punched. Mike throws everything he’s got into the fight, dodging the shots, kicking off the walls for velocity, and it’s still not enough. All he can do is knock it around some and try not to get fried. No wonder Mike’s never fought one before: he doesn’t think these things are meant to be fightable.

“ _USE YOUR TECH, MIKE, DON’T JUST HIT IT!”_ Chuck screams at him.

“What tech?” Mike demands. "I don't think it wants to _have a chat_  with me!" 

Chuck screams again, shrill and sobbing as if he’s snapped a bone, but when Mike whirls around he’s just pressed back against the wall, fingers pulling on his hair. His eyes have that weird, wet terror in them again.

“Hey, stay back!” Mike warns his friend, and turns to give the enforcer drone another heavy kick that hardly even rocks the thing. He throws his whole weight at the bot but he can’t find any leverage with how much he has to flip and dodge all the energy beams.

“Okay, okay—” Chuck whimpers, ”I— okay, I can— I— Mike, okay, GO LEFT!”

Mike dodges left and from behind him comes a burst of green light. Something round and bright smacks into the enforcer drone and _explodes_ , the concussion sending him staggering.

“What was—” he gasps, ears ringing, and two more explosions first slam the machine into the wall, then break it open. Foul smoke billows out and Mike retreats back to Chuck’s side, coughing.

“What happened?” he asks.

“I think I got it,” Chuck says. There’s something on his arm, now, a metal frame, a projectile system. “Mike, we gotta run now, this is really bad, we gotta _go_.”

He turns and starts running.

Mike grabs up his shirt-bundle of supplies and runs after him, catching up and keeping pace with difficulty: Chuck’s still taller than him, and is going flat out. Corridors stretch out before them, too long, too dirty and dark, and it feels like a nightmare.

Finally they reach a final door, a locked and bolted door. Gasping raggedly, Chuck pulls a metal tool out of _somewhere_ with a burst of his tech's hot wind and starts levering the bolts. Mike hovers at his shoulder, feeling unfamiliarly frantic and useless.

The bolts give way, one, two, three, and Chuck shoulders the door open. Beyond the door is a ramp down into darkness, studded with very tiny points of light. All the tension goes out of the boy in a big, dramatic sigh.

“Motorcity,” Chuck says. “We made it.”

“Awesome,” Mike says, profoundly relieved. “Okay, here.” He tries to give the stuff he brought to Chuck, who looks at him in total surprise.

“What?” he says.

“What?” Mike echoes. “Here, take it. I brought this stuff for you.”

“But... where’s your stuff, then?”

“I’m not leaving, man,” Mike says. “I just came along to help you out.”

“ _WHAT!?”_

Mike takes a startled step back. “I’m graduating like next week, dude,” he explains. “I mean, this isn’t the right place for you, so you should go find where, uh, where _is_ , but it’s the right place for me, and I think the Cadet Program I’m going into is going to be right for me, too.”

“You’re _graduating,”_ Chuck says, with a weird emphasis. “ _You’re_ the success they kept talking about. Oh my god. I thought you were too...”

“Too _what?_ ” Mike demands, torn between confusion and hurt.

“Too good,” Chuck shrugs. “You’re too good for this place, dude.”

“Yeah, uh, that’s why I’m _graduating?_ ” Mike says. “I’m too good.”

“No, I mean— forget it. I should have brought someone else. I should have— I should have brought everyone else, what was I thinking?” Chuck pulls on his hair, his eyes getting wet again. “We might have made it. I should have tried. God, god, oh, god.”  

Mike is now definitely hurt.

“Well, you’re _welcome_ ,” he says coldly. “Enjoy the rest of your life, dude.” He turns to go and Chuck grabs his sleeve.

“Wait!”

He almost decks the guy on reflex, but it’s not a throw or anything. He gives Chuck a really annoyed look over his shoulder, still hurt. Chuck would have rather taken _everyone_ else but him now. What a jerk.

“Do you know how to get back to your room?”

Oh. “Uh. No.”

Chuck takes hold of his hand, and one of the screens he’s been using pops up over their joined fingers. Chuck taps the screen and transfers it over to Mike’s control, a warm electric shiver up Mike’s arm, then lets go.

“It’s autonav, it’ll take you... home,” Chuck says. “You’re _really_ graduating? They told you?”

“Yeah,” Mike says.

“Congratulations,” Chuck says. He gives Mike a crooked smile, his eyes still weird and sad, but he seems... sincere. Somewhere under what a messed-up failure he is, he’s a really nice guy.

“Thanks,” Mike says, a lot more warmly. “Good luck with... whatever’s out there.”

Chuck nods, and Mike nods, and Chuck turns and walks down the ramp into the darkness. It swallows him up until all Mike can see is a little flicker against the distant, alien lights.

 

*

 

He doesn’t know where he is or where he’s going. All he knows is he can’t go back. The world down here is dark and smells weird and has colors that hurt his eyes and his head pounds and he’s angrier than he’s ever been in his whole life—

“ _Mike?”_ someone says, and he rounds on them.

“WHAT,” he snaps, fists up. And it’s, holy crap, “ _Chuck?_ ”

“Oh my god, it _is_ you! Mike, what the heck are you doing down here?” Chuck asks, coming forward out of the shadows. He’s got long shaggy hair and weird dark night-colored clothes and he’s holding his hands up too, defensive, and Mike drops his fists, feeling dumb.

“I’m, uh. I quit,” he says. He lets it hit him all over again: he quit, he quit, he’s done, he’s out, he will never go home, he just lost his entire world and it was never really his anyway.

“Wow. Okay, well, uh, welcome to Motorcity, buddy. You look like you just arrived...?”

“Yeah.” Mike laughs a little bitterly. “Yeah, I was on— I was on a mission, and it— I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it.”

“But you’re Mike Chilton,” Chuck says, sounding surprised. “You’re the single success. You can do anything.”

“No. I can’t. There were, all these—there were innocent people. I, I couldn’t, it was wrong. I _WON’T, you can’t MAKE ME.”_ He’s got his fists up again, angry all over, and Chuck’s— wow, okay, Chuck’s cowering away, like he doesn’t remember how many times he’s kicked Mike’s butt. Mike feels guilty, and that just makes him more pointlessly furious.

“It’s okay,” Chuck says. “Mike. It’s okay. You’re free. Down here, you’re free, it’s okay, you don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to hurt anyone down here.”

Mike lets all the anger out in one big sigh, and runs his hands through his hair. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I’m just... I don’t know what to do now. I don’t think I know _anything_.”

“Well, hey, we can fix that,” Chuck says. He takes a painfully small, shuffling little step towards Mike, like he still expects to get punched. “You wanna get a pizza and we’ll talk?”

“What’s a pizza?” Mike asks.

“Okay, we’re definitely fixing _that_ ,” Chuck says. He smiles, and it’s... it’s great. It lights him up. It lights _Mike_ up. They’re going to have fun, now, if Chuck keeps smiling like that. This whole terrifying, awful mess could be fun.

 

*

 

Pizza is the most complicated thing Mike has ever seen, like some kind of organic machine with a dozen interlocked parts. Chuck orders it for Mike, and asks for the “Deluxe Special,” which is a lot smaller than what Chuck orders for himself, and doesn’t have any of the colorful textural pieces.

“It takes you guys a while to get used to real food,” Chuck says. “Some people never really learn to cope with too much flavor. So Antonio makes the Deluxe special with basically no spices or anything. Just cheese and tomato sauce and a whole lotta important bacterial strains to fix your gut flora. It’s room temperature, too.” He makes a face like _room temperature_ is for some reason a bad temperature for ‘real’ food to be, though Mike has no idea what impact other temperatures could possibly have on nutritional value.

The pizza is round and it breaks into flanged triangles and Chuck demonstrates how to eat it, and then Mike sits there and goes _“Whoah_ ,” and “ _Wow,”_ and “ _Does_ every _real food taste like this!?”_

Chuck just laughs, and, after Mike asks a few times and promises he can handle it, lets him eat a pepperoni. Which is kind of like getting sucker-punched in a part of his brain he didn’t know he _had_ before just now, but whatever the expression on Mike’s face is, it makes Chuck laugh until he goes almost as red as a pepperoni himself, so it’s completely worth the experience.

Mike can’t finish more than a couple slices of his before he starts to feel kind of sick, but Chuck packs down the entirety of his much larger meal.

“I burn a lot of calories,” he says, when he catches Mike staring. “I work for this scientist guy, we make custom auto parts for gangs. Getting them to _pay_ for the parts can be kind of, um... crazy.”  

“Auto... like automatic?”

“Automotive. Cars. They’re this absurdly dangerous and terrifying thing a lot of guys have down here, I’ll show you later, you’ll probably love them.”

 

*

 

Jacob is cool, the cars are even cooler, and Mike has a new home now, which is the coolest.

“So where are the others?” he asks, looking around his assigned bunkroom, right across the hall from Chuck’s.

“Other what? Rooms?” Chuck asks. “I think you’ve seen most of them.”

“No, the kids, the rest of us. I’m not the first guy you’ve taken in, right?”

Chuck pushes his bangs back to peer at Mike. He seems kind of puzzled. “...Mike, our project was terminated.”

“Okay?”

“And... I’m the only one who made it down here. _We’re_ the only ones, I mean.”

Mike frowns. “So they’re still up in Deluxe? Only I never saw them in with the other Cadets, so—”

“ _Mike.”_ Chuck actually looks angry now. “Our project was _terminated_. You were _the only success_. You were the only one of us who actually graduated out. I was the only one who escaped.”

“Oh.” Mike tries to wrap his head around that. “So they’re all...?”

“Terminated.”

“So when you left... and you asked me to come along...”

“Yeah. Tried to save the one kid in the project that didn’t need my help. Pretty smart, huh?” Chuck gives Mike an awful, bitter smile, and Mike steps forward.

 _No contact is allowed before the match._ He takes Chuck by the shoulders and just holds him. Hugs him. Puts his head on Chuck’s shoulder. He was taught how to show affection with the Cadets. He doesn’t know if anyone taught Chuck, all alone in Motorcity with his guilt and his fear.

“This isn’t our fault,” Mike says fiercely. “It’s Kane’s. And we’re going to make him pay for it.”

Chuck’s smart, and brave, and a really nice guy. He hugs Mike back. He says, “Okay, yeah. Yeah.” He huffs a quiet, wry little laugh into Mike’s hair, and says: “‘ _Recruits, prepare.'"_

Mike laughs loud and unrestrained. This is going to be _fun_.

**Author's Note:**

>  _From the entrance to the exit_  
>  _Is longer than it looks from where we stand_  
>  _I want to say I'm sorry for stuff I haven't done yet_  
>  _Things will shortly get completely out of hand..._  
>  —"Old College Try", The Mountain Goats


End file.
